Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011)

2021 ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Space Time ◽  
First Century ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Time Continuum

This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

Pietro Basso,Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Livesin the Twenty-first Century. London: Verso, 2003. pp. 275. $27.00 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 134-136
Author(s):  
Gerd-Rainer Horn
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Working Time ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

For some time now, sociologists, economists and assorted futurologists have flooded the pages of learned journals and the shelves of libraries with analyses of the continuing decline of industrial and other forms of labor. In proportion to the decline of working time, those social scientists proclaim, the forward march of leisure has become an irresistible trend of the most recent past, the present and, most definitely, the future. Those of us living on planet earth have on occasion wondered about the veracity of such claims which, quite often, appear to stand in flat contradiction to our experiences in everyday life. The work of the Italian sociologist Pietro Basso is thus long overdue and proves to be a welcome refutation of this genre of, to paraphrase Basso, obfuscating hallucinations.

Brazil’s Role in Latin America’s Regionalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Javier A. Vadell ◽  
Clarisa Giaccaglia
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Political Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
South American ◽  
Regional Policies ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Brazil became a crucial player as the principal advocate of South American integration. To Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur) was added the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), reaffirming regional policies around the idea of “South America.” Today, however, the withdrawal of Brazilian leadership along with the reversals and loss of focus in UNASUR and Mercosur have damaged the credibility of the region’s initiatives, as well as finding South America’s common voice. Despite this, this article argues that Brazil has not entirely disengaged from the region or abandoned the principle of regionalism. Recognition of Latin America’s distinctive history the authors to construct a model that incorporates complexity and disorder in which Brazil’s institutional political development will have significant repercussions for the future of the region.

Rationalist Empiricism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Brown
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Digital Photography ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

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